My first plan of action is to re-read Robinson Crusoe which is full of pointers on how to teach savages. I feel a certain affinity with the congenial castaway. I already have my desert island, my house is out of time and far from any thoroughfare, and if memory serves, my own little savage showed up on a Friday or some other day. As for me, even in these straitened times, I have no shortage of pugnacity and good manners. All of which is good news for her. Providence has brought the sickness to the cure. And another thing, I’m beginning to enjoy my role as the kind-hearted lady of the manor. All I need is a sedan chair or a Rolls-Royce to bear my solitude, I already have a pallid complexion, a deportment that is aloof without being excessive while the house itself is pervaded by an end-of-era atmosphere, while outside, in Algeria, life is strange: the proletariat are disoriented, the patricians exhausted by their vices, the Emirs sated on blood and the poor President has no opponents left to assassinate. What news of the outside world trickles through to us arrives centuries late, drowned out by the whine of machines and the sighs of the mourners. All of which seamlessly becomes my image as the benevolent lady of the manor holed up in the ancestral home.
Chérifa falls asleep earlier and earlier. By midnight, she has drifted far away. She’s sleeping for two. I’ve started giving her herbal tea enriched with baby sedative. I continue on my own, as I’ve always done. I potter around the house, tidy up, have a nibble, I read, I think and when my legs or my eyes start to tingle, I curl up in a corner and doze off. I listen to the silent darkness, to the creaking of the house and, high above it all, the ineffable pulse of time. It is a beautiful music, it enfolds me, seeps into my skin, into every molecule, every atom and deep inside me it blossoms as a giant corolla. It comes from so far, and extends so far, that everything becomes hazy, everything stops, and little by little the moment becomes eternity. I don’t move, I don’t breathe, a gentle, preternatural warmth radiates through me. I feel at peace with everything. I am about to sink . . . I am sinking . . .
As I teeter on the brink of sleep, a cry goes through my head: I have to contact Chérifa’s parents, to let them know she is all right. How could I not have thought of it before? I spent more than a year with no news of Sofiane and all the while every fibre of my being was waiting: I know their pain, I can feel it. I’ll talk to Chérifa, we’ll do what we have to do.
Another thought occurs to me: we should contact the man in the photo, the minister-for-whatever, make him face up to his responsibilities. I immediately dismiss this thought, the bastard has power, he could have us thrown in jail, have the baby adopted by a tattooed harpy like some chador-wearing Madame Thénardier who would force the child to fetch and carry water and later introduce her to a life of crime. He could have the child taken from its mother, taken from me, he could set the State against us. Dear God, he could mould the babe in his own likeness to become a wheeler-dealer, a crook, a profiteer! There’s no point even considering it, the man doesn’t deserve to live.
And while I’m thinking about such weighty matters, tomorrow afternoon I’ll go and find out what’s happening down at the Association. It’s been a while, maybe they will have news for me.
I don’t hold out much hope, but still I go. When your whole life is measured out by nagging heartache and the same haunting questions, you need some sort of ritual. Where are you, Sofiane? What has become of you? When are you coming home?
The Association offices occupy the ground floor of a city-centre building that in some former life must have been palatial. Half ruined, it still has a certain magnificence, surrounded as it is by buildings wholly ruined. The plaque next to the entrance is inscribed with a name as long as a gibbon’s splayed arm: ‘Algerian Family Crisis Centre for the Location and Rehabilitation of Youth Missing as a result of Clandestine Emigration’ – the AFCCLRYMCE. There is a lot to be said about this splayed gibbon and his murderous missions but I prefer to keep things short and simple: I call it the Disappeared Association. At the bottom of the plaque on the aforementioned sanctuary, it stipulates that the Association is authorised by the Ministry of the Interior. I don’t know whether this stipulation is a requirement or whether in this case it expresses a sort of voluntary allegiance. I’m not about to cast stones, I know that in a criminal State such things are easily confused and if you don’t like it, well, too bad. I found out about the Association through Mourad, who gave me the address. The man’s brain is cluttered with information. I wonder about him sometimes – does he come to the hospital out of the goodness of his heart, or is he working there as a sort of unpaid spy? I can’t help but admire my colleagues, they know everything, always, before anyone else. I don’t know one of them who retreats in the face of complexity. Not a single one. Where do they get such self-confidence? Sometimes I feel like killing one of them, putting a bullet through his forehead just to see that flicker of disbelief, that glint of fear as he faces the unknown; to hear him fall silent as he confronts something beyond his comprehension. Mourad is one of those people who knows everything, I thanked him profusely, I hope he remembers that.
The first time I met the President of the Association, she informed me I was asking all the wrong questions. I was helpless, I was desperate for information, I was bombarding her with queries. What she meant, she explained, was that wittering and whining were useless, I needed to stay calm, to let the experts do their job. As she said this she flashed me the sort of smile reserved for polite little girls and cheerfully strode off, briefcase in hand, phone pressed to her ear, with a sardonic swagger. A modern superwoman in pursuit of glory – even TV commercials don’t feature such airheads any more. I never saw her again, thank God. She’s a show-off, a charlatan, the sort of person who frequents salons, fraternises with the lumpenproletariat who monopolise the upper echelons of government and chairs pointless meetings. Her assistant, a sea lion wallowing in an ocean of files, simultaneously advised me not to give up hope and to prepare myself for the worst. This, she took great pleasure in emphasising, showed dignity and responsibility. She showered me with statistics, with grisly photos and press clippings, she bamboozled me with statements intended to reflect the seriousness of the tragedy. The country is being drained of its young and no one is doing anything about it – this was the gist of what she managed to say.
‘I’m not looking for advice on how to behave,’ I snapped back, ‘I want you to tell me what you plan to do to find my idiot brother!’
‘We have our ways,’ she whispered as though discussing assembling a neutron bomb in front of an audience of illiterates.
How dare she! I swear, I’ll rip the bitch’s heart out!
‘And what precisely are these “ways”?’
She glibly began to reel off the protocol, stabbing the air with her finger.
‘We draw up missing persons’ files . . . we liaise with the authorities who in turn liaise with the relevant overseas organisations . . . um . . . we regularly chase up queries . . . we have meetings . . . we draw up a confidential annual report which we submit to the government . . .’
‘Why the secrecy? A missing person is a missing person, everyone knows that.’
‘Um . . . actually I said confidential, there’s a difference.’
‘I realise that, but that doesn’t change the fact that a missing person is a missing person.’
‘We . . . um . . . we are planning to set up a newsletter to be sent out to family members.’
‘Now that’s a stroke of genius. A newsletter is a brilliant way of keeping patients warm.’
‘I suppose you can think of something better?’ she snapped back, lips pursed.
‘I can actually. Toss a message in a bottle into the sea and go home to bed.’
This outburst calmed me a little. Maybe I should have told her that the only way to truly extricate this country from hell itself would be to toss the government into the sea and the wagging tail of the civil service with it. Then young people wouldn’t dream of taking to the sea any more for fear of meeting them b
obbing on the waves. But that’s politics and politics is dangerous, I’m rather attached to my life and to my little job at the Hôpital Parnet. You have to understand that in this Mickey Mouse country, people have every right to complain, but they have no right to complain to the pen-pushers who work for the government. They’re understandably nervous, given that they are constantly plagued by international organisations who want to know why they are cruel, scheming parasites and how so many poor wretches manage to disappear right under the noses of their families, their friends and the powers that be. It’s a valid question, but it’s not the only one that deserves an answer. No one can convince me that the Association aren’t complicit in the whole thing. They act as a screen, they exist so that the administration can sidestep the issue. Who better than a delegation of shrewd women to blindside the bigwigs at the international organisations and force them to admit they were mistaken? These women have a trick or two up their sleeves, they can explain away anything – right down to a concierge’s lumbago – and lay the blame on colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, the IMF and the machinations of You Know Who. What they can’t tell you is how to comfort a decent, upstanding woman.
‘If you take into account the fact that those who resort to clandestine emigration do so in secret via underground networks often linked to multinational terrorist groups – which, by the way, are not necessarily the groups our friends in the West are quick to blame – and furthermore that as often as not they die in secret, then perhaps you might begin to understand just how difficult our work here is,’ she said, suddenly pedantic.
I don’t know whether she’s planning to bore me for the whole evening or masturbate in front of me until cock crow. I need to wake her up.
‘What I understand is that young people are leaving because everything in this country, right down to the taps, is closed to them. Do you know many young people who enjoy captivity? And another thing, why do you refer to it as “clandestine emigration”, when a better phrase might be “mass exodus” . . . though “collective suicide” also has a ring to it.’
‘And what about you?’ she squawks, twin harpoons darting from the eyes of this foul-mouthed goose. ‘What did you ever do to stop your brother from leaving the country?’
‘So you’re saying that it’s up to us, the prisoners, to free the young, to provide schools to emancipate them, work to give them some self-esteem, some goal in life beyond reciting poems for the hard of hearing, some hobbies other than the vicious, bloody pastime of enlisting with the army, the Islamic Salvation Front or – God forbid! – the Defenders of Truth?’
‘What are . . . you’re talking gibberish!’
‘Well, I know what I mean.’
‘. . .’
This, then, was my first visit to the Association. Later visits were not what you might call a success. Whenever they saw me coming, they all ran away screaming, they all suddenly remembered some urgent meeting. My attitude was absurd, it was counterproductive. These minions don’t need much excuse to bury a case file and yet there I was naively thinking that I simply had to motivate them efficiently. I took a different tack. To best a hypocrite, become a hypocrite. I tried to reinvent myself as the arch-defender of dignity and responsibility, as a woman proud of her new-found friends.
But to no avail: my mind refuses to play along, I still can’t stand the sight of them. I thought about Chérifa. It drives me insane to think that she too might end up abandoned in this accursed country or wandering the streets of some port out in the wide world. The mere sight of these stout matrons sitting on their arses, these government lackeys licking their lips in the sunshine, this bloody farce plain for all to see, has me choking with rage. All in all, this was likely to be a grim encounter. I arrived with a solemn smile on my face and Chérifa on my arm looking every inch a queen.
‘So nice to see you again, my dears. How are you all? I feel confident that today you will be able to reassure me, to finally give me some news of my idiot brother.’
‘Sadly not, my dear friend.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘We have been a little behind schedule lately, you understand . . . We’re expecting a delegation from the European Union . . . We’re counting on their financial support . . . we’re working on the files . . .’
‘What files?’
‘You know, the budget, the development plan, the meeting schedule, the press releases . . .’
‘And where does Sofiane come into all this?’
‘Set your mind at rest, he’s in the database.’
‘The database?’
‘Yes, the database.’
‘The database. Well, you learn something new every day.’
‘Absolutely, the database of our dear disappeared. We will give a copy to the EU delegation who will integrate it into their own database. It’s networking . . . you understand?’
‘Absolutely, people can disappear with a clear conscience as long as they are entered into the Great Database.’
‘Are you mocking me?’
‘I’ll go one better, if someone doesn’t stop me, I’ll slap you.’
‘. . .’
I was beside myself. I honestly believe that some crimes are to be encouraged. If every petty king and princeling in this country was broken on the wheel together with all their miserable jesters, our young people might finally see the light. This is what I was thinking as I stomped back, eager to get home and smash some crockery. Crowds parted as I passed, frightened or shocked. Wimps and weaklings who feel women have no right to be angry, to be out of control, pitiful excuses for men. I tugged Chérifa by the sleeve, jostling her along. The poor thing’s whimpers were heartbreaking.
I’ve decided that I’m done with the Association. I’ll do my own search. I don’t know how but I’ll find a way. I’ll hire some neighbourhood kid, some other harraga, encourage him to ‘burn a path’ and find that idiot Sofiane and then . . . no, that’s a stupid idea, I might as well pay for his trip, maybe he’ll send me a postcard from Tangiers, from Marbella, from the great beyond. No, there’s a better solution, I’ll hire a retired cop, they’re wily as foxes and some of them are honest. Late in life, they tend to recover some scraps of their lost humanity. I’d need to find one with a son who disappeared on the harragas’ road, that way we can make common cause. I’ll talk to Mourad, see if he knows anyone who might fit the bill. I . . . No, forget that, Mourad is no help, he gets me all muddled, with him it’s always one dead end to another. I’m not about to forget that thing about bus stations in a hurry. I could put a classified ad in various newspapers, here, in Morocco, in Spain, wherever. ‘Missing Persons’, I wonder whether the category still exists? I remember Papa used to read it avidly, he had a lot of old friends he hadn’t heard from in ages. It’s strange how, even in more peaceful times, people could easily disappear. Back then, it was a routine matter: Missing Persons were classified as casualties of colonialism, harkis who died in an ambush somewhere, case closed. What was even stranger was that some reappeared, alive, roaming the streets, badly injured and unable to explain why, only to find themselves arrested for petit-bourgeois vagrancy, thrown into the back of a truck and tossed out again three villages farther down the road. These days, you have to work hard just to keep track of your own whereabouts. And missing relatives are a dangerous business; you find yourself being interrogated about the shady dealings they were involved in, who was financing it, who was pulling strings, whether the International Organisations are aware of it. It turns into a huge rigmarole. You go to the police station to complain about the police or another branch of the civil service and come away charged with some cold case pulled at random from the Criminal Records Office.
‘You see what will happen if you don’t keep a careful eye on the company your baby keeps?’ I said, twisting Chérifa’s arm.
‘Ow! Why would you wish something like that on us?’
‘What about you? You abandoned your parents, just like that idiot Sofiane, like all those morons who
disappear, who run away instead of . . . of . . .’
Damn it! Suddenly I’m blubbing like a baby.
‘Instead of what?’ asked Chérifa, overcome.
‘Instead of dying here, at home, with their families!’
‘Why do you always refer to him as “that idiot Sofiane”?’
‘Because to die far from your grave is pathetic, you stupid girl!’
The cold closed around me like the grave around a dead man. There is nothing to be said, nothing to be done, nothing to hope for. Evil goes about its business. In a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, when we are all dead and forgotten, life will reassert itself. Inexorably. Women and children will have their part. Right now, there are too many sermonisers, as many more Defenders of Truth, and so many cowards we haven’t room enough to put them. Why do they have beards and warts on their heads when their heads serve no purpose? The question haunts me.
Chérifa and I huddled in a corner and wept buckets.
And then she told me everything. She was four years old when her mother died. She has no memory of her mother and doesn’t know what she died of. I know how she feels, we get a lot of women at the Hôpital Parnet so damaged that it’s pointless to try and work out what they are suffering from, we make a wild guess and we get it wrong. We write Generalised Infirmity and close the file. Chérifa’s eight brothers, all older than her, worked in nearby farms and mills which meant she never saw more than three or four of them at a time. The road was their home. Then, one morning, the father married a she-devil sent back from hell who bore him a litter of sons and daughters. ‘How many of each?’ ‘A bunch, I don’t know, their mother spent all day coddling them and Papa left her to it.’ He was obviously scared of her. When the Islamists showed up and started cutting the throats of local girls, the she-devil fawned on them, made couscous for them, tattled to them about the sins of others hoping to deflect their wrath from her own house. Chérifa posed a problem – being wayward, independent, a moaner, a truant and devilishly pretty, she was an irresistible delicacy for the bearded fundamentalists. One morning, she packed a bag and got the hell out. It is a story that is played out a hundred times, a thousand times all over the country and before long over the world. The green plague of Islamofascism knows no borders. One day, girls will be burned in towns across California, I can just see it, and it won’t be the work of the Ku Klux Klan.
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